


It's not a clippings book

by greyathena



Series: Back-to-Back-verse [4]
Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-12
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-04 03:04:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4123438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greyathena/pseuds/greyathena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Judson left Flynn his own guide to interesting magical problems, and it leads Flynn and Eve on a mission (date?) involving the wildlife of the Mid-Atlantic.  There are geese.  (Or, Flynn and Eve's second date, from the Back to Back universe)</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's not a clippings book

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KaiaBlackrock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaiaBlackrock/gifts).



> You wanted goofy and adorable and somehow I wrote this . . . I don't even know. This happened. :)

On the list of strange things Eve had been asked since coming to work for the Library, "have you ever heard of the Great Dismal Swamp" did not top the list.

("do you know how to get out of an oubliette" was the current holder of the top slot (Stone; fortunately he was not actually in one at the time). second place was "would you kill someone for me?" (Jones; she still wasn't completely sure whether it was a request for information or an actual request))

So she was not at all prepared for the onslaught of weirdness that her home state was about to unleash on her. In retrospect, considering that it was Flynn asking, this was stupid.

"Sure, it's near Norfolk," she replied, already typing into her phone's browser. "It is the largest intact remnant of a vast habitat that once covered more than one million acres of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina."

Flynn looked simultaneously both a bit alarmed and impressed until he noticed that she was reading off her phone.

"Why?" she added.

"Ever been there?"

"When I was about ten; I have some cousins in Chesapeake. Why?" she repeated.

"I just found this book Judson left." He held out what looked like an oldish leatherbound journal, with yellowed lined pages, that looked equally to her eye as if it might have been authentically old, or bought at Barnes and Noble. Given that it was Judson, the latter seemed more likely. "It started out looking like a list of things he wanted to track down but hadn't gotten to, but I swear new pages are showing up."

Her eyes widened in amusement. "Judson left you your own clippings book?"

"Well, it's not a clippings book," he said quickly.

"No, because those are for trainees."

He narrowed his eyes at her smile. "Also, they're not clippings. It's all appearing in his handwriting." He flipped a few pages and showed her line after line of the same even, spidery script.

Suddenly remembering the Libris Fabula and a very different kind of librarian, she touched the pages with a hesitant finger. "You don't think he's . . . _in_ the book, do you?"

"You mean like in Harry Potter?"

"Or something."

He shook his head. "Normally with Judson I wouldn't rule anything out, but - he told me he was moving on. He knew that would be - I mean, I don't think he would have told me that if he planned on sticking around in any way. I guess he just thought seeing his handwriting would make it more . . ." He shrugged.

The last guy she'd seen get trapped in a book hadn't exactly planned it that way, but she wasn't going to mention that. Judson was surely too smart to get sucked into the artifacts, anyway. She brushed her hand against Flynn's lower back. "So what about the Dismal Swamp?"

He seemed to give himself a bit of a shake, and flipped back to an earlier page. "Recognize this?"

Amidst the thin, slightly shaky lines of writing was a drawing of a little bird in equally thin and slightly shaky lines. "It's a bird?" she guessed.

"It's a Swainson's warbler."

"You can tell that from this drawing?"

He pointed to tiny letters under the bird's foot which did, in fact, spell out "Swainson's warbler." Considering Judson's elderly eyes, magic must have been responsible; she practically had to bring the page to her nose to make it out.

"Okay." She handed the book back to Flynn. "Are they magic?"

"According to Judson - or, whatever magic interface is - apparently they're building nests in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge that look like Atlantean palaces."

"Atlantean like Atlantis?"

"Right."

She frowned. "So, like Atlantean palaces as in 'very fancy,' or as in actual replicas of what Atlantean palaces looked like."

"Actual replicas. In dry moss."

"Where _was_ Atlantis?" Yet another conversation that would have gotten her institutionalized back in her old job.

Hardly looking, Flynn stabbed his finger onto a globe near the coast of Morocco. "About there."

She traced it with her finger. "That's almost the same latitude as the Chesapeake."

"Currents should . . ." He looked more intently at the globe and traced invisible patterns in the Atlantic that she assumed meant something to him. "On the other hand, there have been shipwrecks in the James River, haven't there?"

"Lots. Most of them were on purpose though, during wartime. Confederate gunboats, that kind of thing. They're always excavating something . . ." Their eyes met as she trailed off. "Somebody just pulled up something that's making birds build Atlantean palaces?"

"Want to go to Virginia?"

He was a naturalist as well as an archaeologist, and palace-building birds were clearly pretty interesting, but there was something else in his smile, too. Something just for her. She flushed a little. "Virginia's nice this time of year."

The whole thing seemed interesting, maybe even a bit romantic, and completely unlikely to end in the emergency room. Eventually she'd learn that those were all the signs of a case that would actually turn out to be deeply problematic.

"Word's been getting out; people have been coming all week," the ranger told them when they arrived at the refuge office. "Y'all are the first today though, it being a weekday. You want to take the boardwalk trails out toward the lake, that's where they're doing it."

Nothing strange whatsoever happened on the short walk out over marshlands toward the lake in the center of the refuge. Just as the lake came in view, though, they both froze staring at the surrounding trees.

Eve pulled out her phone slowly, although the hundreds of twittering birds flying around them didn't seem disturbed by their presence. "Okay," she said, scrolling. "So, Swainson's warbler nests normally look like . . . a pile of twigs with some mud."

"So . . . not a temple to Ashtart?"

"Is that what that is?"

"Yes, you can see the little towers that look like a bull's horns." He reached around her back and put a hand on her hip, drawing her to stand in front of him. "And that one - right there . . . no, up and to the left - that's a royal palace."

She squinted. "Are those . . . flags?"

"Banners, more accurately. And - yes. They've made banners. Of _Rhododendron nudiflorum_ blossom."

"So the birds have built Atlantis. In the trees. And they've . . . decorated it. With azaleas."

"And some kind of berry." His fingertips lightly stroked her side. "Yup."

She started to turn toward him and stopped, peering over his shoulder. "Are the roots of that tree glowing?"

"Something is." He took a few slow steps toward the gnarled tree, its root system exposed by the receding marsh waters. "It's _moving_."

There were indeed many tiny little moving lights, yellowish in the dimness of the forest. The lights seemed to coalesce into patterns as they approached, until Eve suddenly spotted the pattern forming and froze, a firm grip on Flynn's arm.

"Well now that's weird," he said.

The little glowing lights now spelled LIBRARIAN.

Flynn stepped closer, Eve following at his elbow. "Um," he said. "Hello?"

The lights continued to twinkle, which she could now see was because they were intermittently flashing on and off. She bent closer. "These are . . ."

" _Photuris lucicrescens_!"

". . . fireflies." She extended a hand very slowly, and one firefly came to sit on her finger, its light temporarily dimmed. "In the daytime."

"Is this . . ." Flynn looked at her and shrugged. He spread his hands. "Do you guys know what the birds are doing?"

The lights devolved into a rotating chaos before seemingly agreeing to a new pattern. COMMUNICATING.

Eve and Flynn exchanged looks. "Communicating with who?" she asked. "Us?"

LIBRARIAN.

"I'm trying not to feel excluded," she told the bug perched on her finger.

"So you, and the birds," Flynn said. "Are you trying to tell us something?"

WARNING.

"Oh that's not good," Eve murmured.

Flynn threw her a sidelong glance. "You guys are freaking out the Guardian," he said. "Any more detail than that?"

More apparent conferring among the tiny lights. Several of them flew out and circled in a cloud around Eve's hand, though when they returned to the tree, the one sitting on her finger stayed there.

PROPHESY.

"Okay," Eve said slowly.

"Any prophecy in particular?" Flynn asked.

The bugs went into a flurry of activity.

DISCOVERY.

sOOn. (The Os enormous so as to accommodate all the bugs)

ARTIFACT.

"An artifact is going to be discovered soon?" Flynn asked.

"An artifact from Atlantis?" Eve guessed.

MEDALLION.

BACK BAY.

Flynn looked at her with wide eyes. "The Acolyte's Medallion? That was supposed to be a myth!"

"So is Atlantis," Eve told the bug on her finger.

"The Acolyte's Medallion was supposedly created by a temple acolyte who couldn't be chosen as a priest because of his caste, but who knew more magic than the priests and figured out a way to harness it and steal their power. The legends say his coup going wrong may have been the reason Atlantis disappeared - but that's a completely rejected theory; Newton recorded data proving the Atlantean seismic sea wave theory, possibly with dragon involvement - the Medallion was assumed to be a children's story." He was wringing his hands, pacing in front of the tree. "It's not on any of the lists of the most powerful artifacts, but if the stories were true, it would be . . . cataclysmic, if it were found."

"So how did it get here?"

Flynn frowned, but the fireflies heard her.

WHALE.

"I don't even want to know," Eve said.

"Back bay," Flynn said. "They said 'back bay'; what's -"

"There's also a Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge," Eve replied, grateful to be contributing something other than a firefly perch. "Right on the ocean, it's maybe . . . an hour and a half away. Maybe two."

"So this thing is going to wash up there?"

"When? How soon is soon to a firefly?"

"I wonder if there's any way to find it."

"Well," she said, "I don't think Ranger Dave is going to lend us his car for the trip, so we'd better go back to the Annex."

Flynn turned to the tree and put the palms of his hands together, bowing slightly. "Thank you?"

The fireflies clouded and then formed, in thinner letters: Magicians Friend. The bug from Eve's finger flew off to become the dot on the last i.

"What does that mean?" she asked.

"No idea."

It was late afternoon on the East Coast when they arrived on the deserted beach of the refuge, the Atlantic wide and uninterrupted before them. Very wide. Extremely uninterrupted. "Any hunches?" she asked as they stepped from the road onto the sand.

"Nice walk on the beach?"

She smiled in response to his infectious grin, and they moved southward away from the busyness of Virginia Beach to the north. Their hands brushed accidentally a few times before Flynn finally took hold of hers, and she had to try not to feel like a teenager on a first date as they headed down along the dunes.

Until the swarm in the sky completely distracted her. "Flynn?"

He stopped beside her, still holding her hand. "Are those . . . _geese_?"

"I think so? Have you ever seen geese do that?"

"Until today I never knew fireflies could spell, so . . ."

Mindful of the fireflies, she suggested, "We could try just asking them?"

"Are you -" Flynn started, then glanced at her, cupped his hands around his mouth, and tried again, louder. "Are you guarding the Medallion?"

She _really_ hoped there was no one around to hear them. Meanwhile, it didn't seem as if the geese had heard them, either.

They approached slowly. Flynn called out something that sounded like Latin, which had no impact on the geese, either. "You think the geese speak Latin?" she whispered.

"They're being affected by an Atlantean artifact," he whispered back, "I thought maybe -" He stopped, blinking. "I should try Phoenician."

Whatever he said next meant nothing to her. Or, apparently, to the geese.

"Are you going to talk to us?" she called as they cautiously crept closer. "Guys? Y'all geese?"

Flynn looked at her incredulously and mouthed _y'all?_

She shrugged. "It's Virginia."

"There!" He grabbed her arm, pointing out to sea with the other hand. "See that?"

"A tiny waterspout?" Unusual enough for this area, but it was getting bigger and it was bright green. "That's weird . . ."

"It's moving toward the shore. Fast."

"Really fast," she agreed. "Does it know we're here?"

"I don't know whether that would be good or bad."

Together they ran toward the water line, approximating where the waterspout would come to shore if it continued on its current line. As soon as they got near the water, though, the geese swarmed toward them in a loud, honking barrage until they had backed off.

The waterspout, meanwhile, had made its way to about ten or fifteen feet offshore and hovered there.

"That has to be something," Flynn said.

Eve sighed, and said another one of those things she never would have expected would be necessary to say in her lifetime. "I'll distract the geese. You go chase whatever it is."

"Geese are mean," Flynn cautioned.

When they got back, she was definitely going to ask Jenkins if the flap over the Mother Goose Treaty had anything to do with actual geese. She was ready to believe these could have started a war or two. "Give me a minute to get them all after me."

"Good luck."

"Right." Taking a deep breath, she ran toward the water line, south of where the waterspout appeared to be patiently waiting for Flynn. The geese apparently suspected no ruse, because they came after her with the fury of an army. "Go!" she yelled. She was completely surrounded a second later, wishing she'd brought her gun (and researched hunting laws before they'd come). She kept running in sweeping patterns toward the dunes and back to the water again, covering her head with her arms and occasionally trying to beat a path in front of her. Angry feathers flew, and a sharp pain bit across her right forearm.

"Got it!" she heard Flynn shouting in the midst of her swearing.

"Move!" she shouted back, hoping he got the idea, as she fled back north and prayed the geese would leave her alone once she got outside their original patrol area. To her right she could see him sloshing his way out of knee-high water, clutching a large wet bag with something big in the bottom. His shoes appeared to be tied together and hanging around his neck.

"Why aren't the geese like the other animals?" he yelled as he tried to run, held back by the force of the water.

"You mean - why didn't they tell us nicely - to go away?" They were roughly parallel to each other now, though she was moving much faster and quickly outpaced him. She was leaving behind red droplets on the sand.

"Whatever's affecting the species . . ." He staggered a little and seemed to lose his thread.

She suddenly realized the geese were leaving her alone; in fact, they seemed to be dispersing. She gestured to Flynn, who stopped trying to run and waded out of the water toward her.

"You're bleeding," he said.

"Damn goose bit me." She clamped her left hand over the wound. "What did you get?"

"I think it's a box." With a wary look at the geese, he sat down on the beach, sand clinging to his wet-below-mid-thigh pant legs. Out of the wet bag he pulled a metal box with a design of the sun on the lid.

"It's dry," Eve realized, reaching out to touch it with her right hand. "And - how did it stay in that bag? For that matter, how _old_ is that bag? You'd think in the ocean . . ."

"Step back." He waited for her to obey, then quickly flipped the lid of the box open with both hands. The inside was also completely dry. Sitting in the bottom were a torn scroll, something that looked like a primitive, unbound book, and a bronze-gold medallion with spiky runic figures carved in it.

"That's unbelievable," she said, leaning closer and dropping onto her knees. "That should all have dissolved the minute the box hit the water, except for the metal. And that should be tarnished."

"Magician's friend," Flynn said.

"What?"

"That's what the book says. In Phoenician." He grinned up at her. "This is very exciting."

He seemed to be forgetting the WARNING. "The word you used earlier was 'cataclysmic.'"

"If someone _else_ found it. I think . . ." Gently he turned over a few pages of the book. "I think the book was put with the Medallion to protect it - or to protect the world from it. To keep it from being found by the wrong person."

Her arm stung. She pressed the wound harder and frowned. "So the book made the birds build crazy nests and the fireflies spell and whatever else, to attract your attention and make sure the wrong people didn't find the Medallion?"

"I'll know more when I translate the rest of this." He lovingly caressed the first page of the book again and then closed the lid of the box. "We should get back though. You're bleeding kind of a lot."

"In a minute." Wearily she dropped into a sitting position next to him. "Hey, can you get my phone?"

He carefully slipped it out of her pocket and tried to hand it to her.

"9132," she said, inclining her head at the screen. He tapped it in obediently. "In the Notes I have a to-do list. Would you add 'tetanus shots'?"

"For you or everyone else?" he asked as he typed it.

"Everyone. I've had mine, but . . . we should check up on everybody. Just in case something like this happens."

"Fortunately, birds do not carry rabies." He scrolled and frowned. "'Talk to Flynn about Large Collections'?"

"Oh." Experimentally she removed her hand from the wound on her arm. The blood had slowed to a seep. "Is there a way we can keep the others out of Large Collections unless they're with you or Jenkins or Charlene?"

"Hmm." He frowned out over the horizon. The geese were all but gone, flying inland toward the marshes. "I'll think about it. There are a lot of ways they could either kill themselves or end the world, now that you mention it."

"Great. You can delete that one." Balancing awkwardly without the use of her hands, she rolled to her knees and stood, walking down to the water's edge. She scrubbed her hands together under the waves to wash the blood off her left hand and then rinsed her wounded arm, wincing at the bite of the saltwater.

When she returned to sit next to Flynn, he was thoughtfully banging the soles of his shoes together. "Hungry?" he asked.

She looked out over the impending sunset. About 5 back in Oregon. "Yes," she said. "Though that may be the blood loss talking."

"There's that sandwich place near the ER. When we get back."

"Divide and conquer?"

"That would be fastest. I mean, or I could come with you. If you want."

She didn't have to think about it. "Honestly, I would prefer a faster sandwich over you watching me get an antibiotic."

"I should probably get some dry pants first."

She laughed. When she turned her head to look at him, he was very close, and without letting herself think about it too much she leaned in and brushed a kiss at the corner of his mouth. She could taste the saltwater both in the air and on his skin.

She went to turn away again, but he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her back, kissing her properly as his other hand stroked her hair back from her face. She didn't want to think about what it looked like between the beach winds and the geese, but he didn't seem to find fault.

"Home?" he asked.

She nodded. "Home."

He gave her a hand to help her to her feet, and they started back across the sand toward the road. As they walked, he slung the wet bag over his shoulder, artifacts tucked safely inside, and turned to grin at her. "Fireflies!"

"I wonder why Judson's book didn't just send us here in the first place," she mused.

"That's a good point." He was quiet for a few moments. "Judson would have liked the birds' nests. And the fireflies."

"So we started at Dismal Swamp just to see it?"

On the other hand, nothing _there_ had bitten her.


End file.
